Our 2024 Predictions + Jenny Slate Answers Your Hard Questions!

Plus, a very special Hard Fork holiday surprise.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Kevin Roose?

  Oh, my God, this sweater is like made out of the worst. So I got like wish.com so hard on this.

• 0:41Casey Newton?

  What is that? Why? OK, first of all, you're using wish.com as a verb. What does that even mean?

• 0:44Kevin Roose?

  OK, so you know on like wish.com, when like you order something that looks like a nice like sequin dress or something and like it arrives and it's like-

• 0:50Casey Newton?

  I've never actually ordered a sequined dress off of wish.com, Kevin. How did yours actually look when it arrived?

• 0:55Kevin Roose?

  I'm just saying, this is like a thing that people report. They like order from wish.com. Does something looks very nice and then it shows up and it's like a piece of garbage. So this, when I, when I ordered this on Amazon, it looked like a sweater. It looked woven. It looked very like luxurious. I thought it's gonna be very comfortable, even though it's hideous. It shows up, it's like, it's like one of those sweat suits that like wrestlers wear to make weight, like the day before the meet. Like, it's just polyester. It's like zero breathability. Like, I'm burning alive in this thing.

• 1:22Casey Newton?

  It looks like it costs about $8. Is that right?

• 1:25Kevin Roose?

  I think it was like 13, but you're close.

• 1:26Casey Newton?

  OK, so for 13, I think you probably were wrong to expect it would be hand woven by artisans. I would say that's a $13 sweatshirt if I've ever seen one.

• 1:42Casey Newton?

  I'm Kevin Rusak, Tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is a special holiday edition of Hard Fork. This week on the show, we look back at our predictions for this year and tell you our predictions for next. And then comedian, actor, and writer Jenny Slate joins us to answer your hardest questions about technology.

• 2:20Kevin Roose?

  Casey, happy holidays.

• 2:21Casey Newton?

  Happy holidays to you, Kevin. I can't believe we're here at the end of another year of Hard Fork.

• 2:26Kevin Roose?

  What a year. So much to celebrate, so much to recover from. It's been a very long, very good year for our podcast. We've made so many, so many episodes, and this is our last one of the year. After today, we are taking off for a holiday break.

• 2:41Casey Newton?

  Now, Kevin, I have to say that while I'm excited about every episode of Hard Fork that we do, this one in particular, I think is really going to be a treat for folks.

• 2:48Kevin Roose?

  Because we're wearing hats and sweaters?

• 2:50Casey Newton?

  Well, not only that, but we have got a guest who is somebody who I've been wanting to talk to forever. And we've got some interesting predictions about the year ahead.

• 2:59Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So I think we should just talk through, for those not watching us on YouTube right now, we are both wearing ugly holiday sweaters. Yours has like a

• 3:06Casey Newton?

  Speak for yourself. Mine is beautiful.

• 3:08Kevin Roose?

  Yours is beautiful. Yours has like Santa in space riding on a unicorn.

• 3:13Casey Newton?

  That's right. The official horse of the gay community. And you are wearing a even louder sweater, sweatshirt, that features a velociraptor wearing a Santa hat that is dragging Santa's sleigh and Santa behind the velociraptor. And what was sort of the artistic vision behind your fit today, Kevin?

• 3:31Kevin Roose?

  It was just sort of like, what would happen if you put ugly Christmas monstrosity into Dolly and like had it spin out a bunch of examples? It just seemed like the most futuristic of the options available to me that were prime eligible on Amazon.

• 3:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Kevin Roose?

  No, Casey, I love the holiday season. You know, I, you know, every year, you know, I start playing the holiday music right after Thanksgiving. It's been on constant rotation in my house. And it's just, it's my favorite time of year.

• 4:02Casey Newton?

  It is. And the way that I that I know this deeply is because the hats that we're wearing right now were your idea. So that's really the firmest evidence that I have that you really are a holiday person. But you know what? I'm a holiday person, too. It's nice to come together at the end of the year to celebrate with friends, to be together with friends and family in person, to give maybe a gift here or there. These are the good times.

• 4:21Kevin Roose?

  Yuletide spirit is very important to me.

• 4:23Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 4:24Kevin Roose?

  All right. So today, for our second annual holiday extravaganza, I thought that we should revisit those predictions and make some predictions for 2024.

• 4:34Casey Newton?

  Punditry accountability. It's a crisis in this country. Think about how many predictions are being made all the time, but when do the pundits actually go back and point out what they got right and what they got wrong? Here on Hard Fork, the Hard Fork promise is we're going to tell you how we did.

• 4:47Kevin Roose?

  We each made three predictions last year. I don't want to go through all of them. But if you could just say, like, what is the thing that you predicted last year that you were the most right about and the most wrong about?

• 4:56Casey Newton?

  So here's the thing that I was most right about. I said last year, the media's divorce from Twitter will begin in earnest, and that to the extent that Twitter and the media are inextricably linked, that will be much less true at the end of 2023. And I am here to tell you, I was right about that.

• 5:11Kevin Roose?

  You were.

• 5:11Casey Newton?

  X, as it is now known, has seen an exodus of users, advertisers, and members of the press. We've seen some news organizations, most notably NPR, stop posting on X entirely. My little publication, Platformer, is also no longer posting on X. Part of that is because I think a lot of folks just can't stomach what X is today. And another big part of it is that we actually now have alternatives, whether it is Threads, or Mastodon, or Blue Sky. Really interesting things are happening in the race to replace what Twitter used to be. In fact, as we're recording this, Mark Zuckerberg just announced that they're going to begin testing, actually federating Threads the way that they say that

• 5:53Casey Newton?

  they would. So Threads and Mastodon are going to be sort of linking up in a way that I think portends really interesting things for 2024.

• 6:00Kevin Roose?

  You could say they're threaderating it.

• 6:02Casey Newton?

  You could say that. I wouldn't. You could say that. Um, so yeah, that was one that I got right.

• 6:07Kevin Roose?

  And one that I got right mostly was I predicted that this would be the year of the mini Musk, when a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs would see what Elon Musk did at Twitter with all his cost cutting and his mass layoffs and his focus on extremely hardcore engineering and efficiency. And I think that has generally come true. I mean, we saw layoffs this year at a bunch of big tech companies, a lot of focus on efficiency and stripping out layers of management. Not everyone has sort of like emulated Elon Musk's every move because obviously that has not gone well at Twitter. But I would say this cost cutting in particular is something that we've seen across a lot of the tech industry. So unfortunately, I was pretty right about that. What was the thing you were most wrong about?

• 6:48Casey Newton?

  Well, I said that I predict that the Supreme Court will uphold the Texas and Florida social media laws and make content moderation illegal there. And this has not happened yet. Both of these cases are still pending, and it is still possible that it might happen. But so far, has it come true?

• 7:05Kevin Roose?

  And the thing I was most wrong about, I predicted that TikTok would be banned in the United States in the year 2023. That did not happen. And in fact, I would say it's probably less likely that it will be banned now than it looked a year ago when lawmakers were furious about it and accused it of being a Chinese spying app. There's still a lot of concern about TikTok, but I don't think it's going to get banned anytime soon.

• 7:27Casey Newton?

  Well, and I guess we should say that one way that you were right was that Montana did pass a ban on TikTok, but it got blocked in court. And I imagine that similar efforts around the country will meet the same fate.

• 7:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. All right. Let's get to our predictions for next year, for 2024. Last year, we started a tradition that I think we should keep this year, which is to separate our predictions into confidence intervals. So we have high confidence predictions. These are predictions that we're like 80% sure will happen in 2024. Medium confidence predictions, which is like maybe 50% coin flip. And then low confidence predictions, which are things that maybe are only 20% likely to happen, but they would be kind of funny if they did.

• 8:07Casey Newton?

  I like that.

• 8:08Kevin Roose?

  You go first. What's your high confidence prediction?

• 8:10Casey Newton?

  Okay, my high confidence prediction is that threads over

• 8:16Casey Newton?

  You know what's so funny? I wrote Threads overtakes X in daily users and launches in the Fediverse. I wrote this on December 12th. On December 13th, Threads announced that they were coming to the Fediverse. So Mark Zuckerberg has preempted me, the rascal. So I guess I would amend my high confidence prediction to just Threads overtakes X in daily users.

• 8:41Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 8:41Casey Newton?

  This is essentially just an extension of my prediction from last year. So maybe you can say that I'm not trying hard enough here. But I still see skeptics. In fact, The Economist Tyler Cowen wrote a blog post this month where he said that essentially things are going much better on X than the media would have you believe. And this is still kind of where the action is. And I'm sorry, but I just don't think that is the case. I see more interesting stuff happening on Threads every day. And I believe that by the end of 2024, it is going to be the text based social platform of choice for the most daily users.

• 9:14Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I can see this, but I'm also like, I kind of see Tyler Cowen's point too. Like, it has been surprising to me how much longevity Twitter has had, even as I think you and I would both agree, the quality of the discourse over on X has been just worsening every day. You know, people keep sort of loudly announcing their departures. And yet, you know, when big news happens, when the OpenAI stuff was happening, when stuff happens in Gaza that people really want to know about, a lot of them are still going to X to figure out what's going on. So as much as I would like to see that platform sort of, you know, decline as a source of news for people who, you know, care about seeing good information, it does not seem to be losing users as fast as I would have assumed.

• 9:59Casey Newton?

  All right. Well, I guess we'll just see who turns out to be right on that one. What is your high confidence prediction for next year?

• 10:07Kevin Roose?

  My high confidence prediction is that a lawless LLM chatbot will get 10 million daily active users.

• 10:15Kevin Roose?

  What do I mean by lawless LLM chatbot? I mean, basically, a version of ChatGPT with no rules or very few rules. And one of the things that makes me confident about this is I just think we are starting to see a kind of backlash to what people feel are the overly restrictive policies that some of these chatbot makers have. As you've talked about, like, if you ask anything remotely sexual or spicy of one of these chatbots, it shuts you down. Like, you can't discuss, you know, controversial political issues. And you also can't do a lot of stuff that, you know, people seem to want to do, which is like have AI girlfriends and boyfriends or have erotic conversations. So up until now, there have been sort of open source chatbots or chatbots that have

• 10:59Kevin Roose?

  been tailor made for some of these sort of more, you know, controversial use cases, but none of them have grown very big. And the big companies like OpenAI have really stayed away from those markets because they don't want to be known as like, you know, spicy chatbot companies. But in 2024, I think what we're going to see is that these open source models are getting good enough that someone is just going to take one of them, take all of the guardrails off, put a chatbot interface and put it online. And I think that will be a very popular product.

• 11:29Casey Newton?

  I gotta say, Kevin, I think this is a good one. And the main reason is that there is so much money to be made here. It is sitting on the table. Somebody is eventually going to pick it up. And 2024 is as good a year as any.

• 11:39Kevin Roose?

  Yep. All right. What's your medium confidence prediction?

• 11:42Casey Newton?

  All right. Medium confidence. Google mostly catches up to OpenAI in LLM quality and begins to neutralize the lead that ChatGPT has today.

• 11:50Kevin Roose?

  Interesting. So you think Gemini Ultra, when it comes out early next year, is going to settle the debate? Or do you think that they're going to keep coming out with stuff that is outperforming ChatGPT?

• 12:00Casey Newton?

  I think it is very possible that the end of next year, OpenAI's best product still is a little bit better than Google's best product. I just think it is going to matter less because I think that Google is going to get better and better at figuring out how to distribute the stuff that it has, getting its large language models in front of you, helping you figure out new ways to use it in the places where you're already using Google, whether it is Gmail or Chrome or Docs or A. Any of the other places where so many people are already using Google. So I think next year you start to see the differences in quality between the LLMs matter less and distribution matters more and Google is very good at distribution.

• 12:35Kevin Roose?

  Hmm, I like that prediction.

• 12:37Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 12:37Kevin Roose?

  My medium conference prediction is that white collar workers will start unionizing to fight AI related job losses. So this is something that I've been waiting to see ever since the Hollywood actors and writers strikes is whether sort of workers in other industries were going to get worried about the use of AI to replace their jobs or to hurt their economic position in some way and would start to form unions in industries that have not historically had large union presences, think law, think finance, think some pockets of media, even tech industry unions, I think are possible because now programmers, some of them are starting to worry that their jobs are going to be replaced.

• 13:19Kevin Roose?

  And actually, the AFL-CIO, which is one of the biggest unions in the country, announced that it was forming a partnership with Microsoft to sort of study and discuss the ways that AI should be incorporated into workplaces. So this is already a conversation that is happening in a lot of white collar industries among workers who are starting to get nervous about this stuff. And I think that 2024 may be the year that we start to see workers take real action to stand up and say, this technology is happening, we're worried about what it means for the future of our work and we're going to unionize in order to be able to bargain collectively about it.

• 13:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I agree with you. I think we're going to see a lot more workers asking that question, as they should be.

• 14:01Kevin Roose?

  Yep, totally. All right. What's your low confidence prediction?

• 14:04Casey Newton?

  All right. And I do want to stress this is a low confidence prediction, but I, what I've written here is Apple's Vision Pro, its mixed reality headset, is successful enough to revive interest in mixed reality and the metaverse.

• 14:17Kevin Roose?

  Wow, you think the metaverse is back?

• 14:19Casey Newton?

  I think it could be making a comeback. You know, for so long, I waved away stories about AI because there was nothing in my world that I was using and I just kind of couldn't really see it. I accepted that maybe it would be something someday, but there was nothing that was on my computer right now that I could use. I wonder if 2024 is going to be like that for the metaverse for some people. Now, the Vision Pro is incredibly expensive, costs more than $3,000. Most people are not going to have one, but Apple is the best in the world when it comes to creating technological status symbols. And when this thing comes out, it is going to be an object of fascination. I think rich people are going to clamor to get them. They'll be bragging to all their friends about what they're doing in them. And I do think that that could offer a little groundswell of support for what Apple is

• 15:04Casey Newton?

  not calling the metaverse, but of course Meta is. But I do think Meta will be able to capitalize on that. They're making their own improvements to their own headsets. And so by the end of 2024, does it feel like maybe VR mixed reality is a little bit bigger than it was in 2023? I do have low confidence that that is true.

• 15:20Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I also have low confidence that is true, but I think it's possible, which is why I like that you included that as your low confidence prediction. All right, mine is Elon Musk will get his own Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

• 15:32Casey Newton?

  Oh, tell me more about this.

• 15:34Kevin Roose?

  So I don't know if you've heard, but in 2024 in the United States, there will be an election.

• 15:38Casey Newton?

  Ah, yes, of course.

• 15:39Kevin Roose?

  And notoriously, in presidential election years, people get up to all the craziest shenanigans on the internet.

• 15:45Casey Newton?

  That's true. In fact, I believe Donald Trump is calling it the final election we'll ever have.

• 15:48Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So notoriously, during the 2020 election cycle, there was this whole drama where the New York Post reported a story about Hunter Biden's laptop, and it was right before the election and people were speculating, is this Russian disinformation? Was this material hacked? Twitter, which at the time was run by Jack Dorsey, decided to sort of throttle and cut off access to this article while it tried to figure out what was going on. This became a huge conflagration. People got super upset, accused them of censorship. Jack Dorsey ended up sort of saying that was a mistake. And this became sort of one of the things that I would argue sort of caused Elon Musk

• 16:32Kevin Roose?

  to want to buy Twitter and to radically reorient its views on content moderation. He was very upset that this thing had happened. He wanted to like get to the bottom of it. And so he bought the company and changed the rules. And I think that in 2024, we may see a similar October surprise from the other side. And I think that when that happens, when there's something about Donald Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is, that Elon Musk doesn't like, or thinks might be disinformation, or just is skeptical of, he is going to decide to throttle access to it, or cut it off, thereby replicating the exact mirror image of the situation that made him so pissed off that he bought Twitter in the first place.

• 17:16Casey Newton?

  Well, I like this because Elon Musk himself has said that the funniest outcome is often the most likely, and this would be perhaps the funniest outcome for Musk acquiring the site.

• 17:26Kevin Roose?

  It's true. And I think that when that happens, he should hire Yoel Roth to fix the problem and restore trust and safety at X.

• 17:33Casey Newton?

  I think Yoel might not be available for that job anymore, but you could ask.

• 17:37Kevin Roose?

  All right. So that's my low confidence prediction. I like these predictions.

• 17:40Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think we covered a lot of ground. Next year is going to be big. I'm sure that there are some stories that are not in these predictions that will wind up dominating a good deal of discussion next year. But I don't know, from what we know here in December, this seems like as good a series of guesses as any.

• 17:54Kevin Roose?

  And in fact, I think I like these predictions so much that I think we should do something that we've never done before on this show, which is to open prediction markets for our predictions.

• 18:04Casey Newton?

  Interesting. Okay.

• 18:04Kevin Roose?

  We've talked on the show about prediction markets. I spend some time on this site called Manifold, which allows you to sort of bet on various outcomes. And so we will go on and create prediction markets for all of our 2024 predictions, so that our listeners and people who agree with us or disagree with us can go actually wager fake money on whether or not these things will happen.

• 18:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I would say spend a lot of money on this.

• 18:29Kevin Roose?

  Spend a lot of, it's not money, it's mana. It's their fake currency. And if you want to bet on our 2024 prediction markets, you can find them on manifold.murkets. And I also think we should check in on the predictions that have been made about us on manifold markets.

• 18:44Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Wait, you said like there are plural predictions that have been made about us?

• 18:47Kevin Roose?

  There sure are. Yeah. So one of them that I think we should get your take on is, will the Hard Fork Podcast have one episode before the end of 2023 that does not talk about AI?

• 19:02Casey Newton?

  I mean, first of all, why would you want to have an episode of Hard Fork that doesn't talk about AI?

• 19:06Kevin Roose?

  Right. I love this, though, because it's like, it's an active market. There have been 25 trades on this market. It's currently sitting at 10%. So people do not think it is likely that we will stop talking about AI. And I will say, I love this as a form of reader feedback. You know, in the old days, people would have written like an angry letter to the editor saying like, can those guys stop talking about AI? I'm really getting sick of it. And now you can just open a prediction market.

• 19:27Casey Newton?

  Look, I was, we talk all the time about talking about things that are not AI. In fact, we often do have segments that are not about AI. And they're some of my favorites, but it's like, one of the things we're committed to is like telling the most important stories of the moment. And AI just really is kind of at the center of all of them.

• 19:41Kevin Roose?

  Totally. The second prediction market that I wanted to check in with you about that already exists on manifold markets is, has the following title. Will Casey Newton begin dating an AI before June of 2024? Now, I promise, I did not write this.

• 19:57Casey Newton?

  Really?

• 19:58Kevin Roose?

  This was made by the user we and its current probability is only 15%. So most people do not believe it is likely that you will begin dating an AI before June of 2024. But what do you think?

• 20:13Casey Newton?

  I mean, I also don't think I'll begin dating an AI before June of 2024. I'd be curious to sort of know what is meant here by date. You know, is it meant that like, once or twice a week, like I go to dinner by myself and just like type onto my phone to some sort of AI boyfriend? Because that doesn't seem very likely. Yeah, I don't know. I don't see it. Now, do I think that by June, many more people will have AI boyfriends or girlfriends and unbinded friends than they do today? Like, yes, I do believe that.

• 20:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, there actually are some discussions happening in the comments of this particular market about what the resolution criteria are. One user asked, how will this market resolve if after a few too many drinks, Casey Newton has a spicy one night stand with an AI? But in the morning, Casey says it was a mistake and something that will never happen again. But somehow the AI gets Casey's phone number and starts calling at all hours, which Casey ignores one day. Until one day, he gets a call during his goddaughter's quinceañera, which causes him to grab the phone and shout angrily into the receiver that he will never love you before realizing that it was actually Kevin calling. And he tries to explain, but Kevin's not having it. And by the end of the month, they've decided to put Hard Fork on an indefinite hiatus so that they can both pursue new opportunities.

• 21:26Casey Newton?

  Well, I'm glad someone has figured out the most likely outcome of all of this and just put it in writing so that I didn't have to. That's a really inspired piece of writing.

• 21:36Kevin Roose?

  It really is. Yeah, if you are the person who left that comment on the market for this question, please get in touch. We have some creative writing opportunities for you.

• 21:44Casey Newton?

  We really do.

• 21:48Kevin Roose?

  All right, that's enough predictions. When we come back, we have hard questions from our listeners and a very special guest, Jenny Slate.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 22:51Speaker 03

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• 23:57Kevin Roose?

  Casey, we've got a special holiday treat today. So periodically on the show, we do our segment Hard Questions, where we solicit our listeners' biggest ethical and moral dilemmas about technology or some tech thing that is going on in their lives. And we try to answer them. And today, to help us with that, we have a very special guest.

• 24:14Casey Newton?

  That's right, because as much fun as Kevin and I have giving you advice, we know it could be better if we bring in one of the funniest people I know. And right now, we have a chance to do just that, because Jenny Slate is coming on Hard Fork. This truly is a holiday treat, Kevin, because, you know, we like to have fun on the show, we like to laugh, we like to joke around. But we are not professional comedians, okay? Like, making people laugh is, at best, like a side project for us. Jenny Slate is a pro.

• 24:45Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 24:45Casey Newton?

  And is one of the funniest people around. I first saw her on Saturday Night Live. Then she played Mona Lisa Saberstein on Parks and Rec, one of my favorite roles of hers. Since then, she's done voices in a bunch of great animated films and TV shows, including Zootopia, Bob's Burgers, and Big Mouth. And she is also the co-creator and voice of beloved character Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. And incredibly, she's agreed to come on Hard Fork and help us give out advice to listeners for the holidays. Have you ever been so excited for a segment?

• 25:15Kevin Roose?

  No, I'm very excited. And I think we should also explain, like, how this came about.

• 25:18Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Kevin Roose?

  Because it was a little roundabout. So we got this DM. And usually, like, I don't check my DMs on Instagram all that much, because, like, it's mostly just cryptocurrency scams and stuff. But we did see a DM from someone purporting to be Jenny Slate.

• 25:29Casey Newton?

  And she had that blue checkmark.

• 25:30Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and I thought, well, this is exciting. And she said, um, she said she listens to the show. And she said, uh, I'll just read from her DM here. "If you ever want to talk to a 41-year-old stand-up comedian who's afraid of tech but wants to learn about it, but is very turned off by it, you can just email me." And we both sort of silently screamed to ourselves and freaked out and immediately emailed her.

• 25:50Casey Newton?

  I mean, it was amazing. And yet, I think Jenny really stands in for a lot of the audience here, because I think so many listeners want to learn about tech and are also turned off by it at times. In fact, I think you could probably describe both of us that way often. And so Jenny, I think, is very much simpatico with the vibe of Hard Fork. And, um, she's here right now.

• 26:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, let's bring her in.

• 26:08Casey Newton?

  Amazing.

• 26:19Kevin Roose?

  Jenny Slate, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 26:20Speaker 05

  Hello, thank you for having me.

• 26:21Casey Newton?

  Hey Jenny.

• 26:22Speaker 05

  I just was listening and I was like, oh no, they want Shania Twain. This is like such a letdown and I invited myself. The whole thing is weird. I haven't even told my other friends that I did this. And then I didn't tell my husband that I was so embarrassed that I did it. And anyway, I'll go get my t-shirt. I'll be right back.

• 26:42Casey Newton?

  Great.

• 26:45Casey Newton?

  Well, so I have to respond to the last thing you said Jenny, because for a while, we have thought like, it would be really cool if like a comedian or actor like wanted to come on the show. But what are we supposed to do? Just like end the show by saying like, hey, if you're like a celebrity, DM us. And then literally you just DM'd us. So it was really kind of like a the secret moment where we manifested it. And I just think that, you know, this was meant to happen.

• 27:09Speaker 05

  I just love that so much in so many ways. And I listened to the podcast. I love it so much. I really just love the whole thing. I love your personalities and how much you guys make each other laugh. It just makes me smile so much and I love all the information. And I hardly know how to work my computer. And so-

• 27:29Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I was just gonna ask, like, what is your relationship to technology these days?

• 27:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  It's the same that it's been since like around Napster, if that makes any sense. So like for me, for example, the other day, I was parking my car and my husband was like trying to find the car and he was like, drop a pin. And my response was, I don't know how to do that. And it's like, I know it's not hard to learn, but there's something about technology that makes me feel really, sometimes I get really petulant about it. And I just like, am the modern equivalent of the old person who says like, well, we had to walk six hours, you know, six miles or hours or whatever, a long time or like very hard way in the snow to go to school or something. Like I'm just, I have a computer.

• 28:21Speaker 05

  I don't really use it for anything except for I use Microsoft Word.

• 28:25Casey Newton?

  It's a good one. Classic.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I love that one.

• 28:30Speaker 05

  I recently, somehow recently, my computer started to get my text messages and I don't know why, but I do them from there sometimes.

• 28:38Casey Newton?

  But see, I imagine, like your iMessages are popping up in a window on your computer. This is how all the cool kids are texting these days.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Is that true?

• 28:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it's true. Yeah. So that's like, that's an advanced level move, but it's very helpful what I find.

• 28:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I love it, but then, like, there's a, there's a limit. For example, my computer doesn't know who a lot of those people are. And so I don't know why some contacts go that, like, I'm like a grandmother and I'm comfortable with it. But then I started to be uncomfortable with not understanding what was like going on in the world. And so that is why I listen to your podcast every week and enjoy it and take in the information. And I feel less alienated from the, the world at large, I guess.

• 29:27Casey Newton?

  Amazing. Well, that's wonderful to hear. Thank you for, for listening and for coming on. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about one more tech thing, just, you know, based on our interactions, which was when we were, we, I, you know, I, I think it's okay to say, we were messaging on Instagram, one of the social platforms. Yeah. And you suggested that you, you have had a maybe complicated relationship with Instagram, which, which I think Kevin and I have had as well. But like, can you speak to kind of, maybe the ways it was driving you crazy a little bit?

• 29:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. It would sort of make me feel bad about myself. Even if someone that I like was doing something that they enjoyed and I was happy for them, there would be this like, you know, strange feeling about inadequacy that I honestly didn't even identify with.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  And I, I did not find a use, a greater use for that feeling in my life. So I was like, oof, I would like to not feel like this. And so I stopped. It didn't make me feel good. And I, I wasn't sure about it for me as a way to do, the only thing I'm sure it works for is for like, when I want to tell people that I'm doing a stand-up show. Or that I have a new book or some sort of work. I like it as a bulletin board for that. Or to, and I don't do really like any DMs, so.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  So I have one DM with the people who know all about tech and computers and I feel like that's fair.

• 30:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, well, we're here to be your personal tech support.

• 30:52Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 30:53Kevin Roose?

  Anytime your printer breaks, just reach out.

• 30:55Casey Newton?

  And I just want to say, because I think, you know, I'm sort of hearing in your voice, you know, maybe some like insecurities about your relationship with tech. But I just want to say like, there is such wisdom in what you have done. I think one of the hardest things for people to do with the personal technology in their lives is to just have an intentional relationship with it. And if there is something in your life that is like causing you pain and misery and you got rid of it, like, congratulations, that is actually how you win at tech, is doing that.

• 31:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So we have some listener questions to answer with your help.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 31:25Kevin Roose?

  This is our segment Hard Questions, where we solicit questions or ethical dilemmas from our listeners and try our best to answer them. So Jenny, you have gamely agreed to help us answer some listener questions. First up, we've got a story from listener Mike Ford about a new pattern he's seeing at weddings.

• 31:41Speaker 06

  Hey, Hard Fork. My name is Mike Ford. I live in Wisconsin. I've been a wedding photographer and videographer for 15 years. And I have noticed something that I can't prove, but every single groom is using AI to write their love letters and then also for the vows, obviously that too. And it's something we've discussed a lot at my company, just among us, like, is it cringe? Is it not? You know, is it inspirational? And I'm telling you, these grooms are not using it for inspiration. They are copying it verbatim.

• 32:20Speaker 06

  Anyways, I actually saw a groom reading it out of the ChatGPT browser to his bride-to-be sitting on a bed before their wedding.

• 32:30Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 32:31Kevin Roose?

  So Mike didn't have a specific question here, but I think there's a lot to unpack. Jenny, what do you make of the wedding ChatGPT industrial complex?

• 32:41Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh, that really shocked me. I, first of all, I love, now I'm gonna just misquote him, but I've noticed something that I can't prove is, wow. I mean, I think I've said that before to past partners. I've noticed something that I can't prove.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  Then, okay, I was listening. I was like, well, if the people they're getting married to don't mind, if they're just like, hey, Justin, don't, don't just, you know, show up and have nothing, just have something, just have something to say in front of my dad and my stepmom or whatever. It's like, okay, fine. Like, if that's what's fine with everyone, whatever, it's your wedding, you know, it's, that's fine. But, oh, how absolutely terrible if the bride thinks. Because, you know, I don't know, like, when you, when you're getting married, and I, I'm not an expert, but I've done it two times. Um, and one thing that I like about getting married, um, and that my, my husband did very well, is that I was like, you know, this will be the moment when he'll show his, his heart and like,

• 33:44Speaker 05

  you know, to our community and to me. And that is a special alchemy, you know, and that magic of honesty and love and romance and ceremony. And so that, if you think that that's coming from a human, but in fact, it's coming from an, you know, whatever, an, an AI being.

• 34:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah, whatever is right.

• 34:06Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what do you, do you think that, do you think that A, this is unethical for grooms to be doing this? And B, that Mike should do something about it?

• 34:13Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 34:14Casey Newton?

  I, here, here's my perspective on this. I think it is fine to use ChatGPT to write the first draft of your vows, right? Most people that are getting married for the first time, they don't even know what it is supposed to. You know, maybe they've been to a few weddings and they have some vague sense of what it's like, but they want to get some ideas of like, what are kind of the main points that I want to hit? I don't have any problem with that. You know, most people are terrified of public speaking. It's a very scary moment to stand up in front of all your friends and family, do that. So I'm sympathetic to the grooms. But what I will say is, you should write a second draft. You should go through and you should say, do I, do I love anything specific about my fiance? And like, if so, say that. I think that kind of squares the circle.

• 34:57Casey Newton?

  You'll have your good vows. You got through it with some assistance, which is fine. And Mike can stand down and he doesn't have to, you know, ruin the wedding.

• 35:04Kevin Roose?

  I think my, my red flag here is less about the use of ChatGPT. And I'll, I'll confess that the first time I heard that people were Doing this for their wedding vows. My reaction was like, oh, that's horrible. And I think these marriages are doomed. But but the more I'm thinking about Mike's question, the thing I actually object to is not the the use of chat GPT. It's it's the lying about it, right?

• 35:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:22Kevin Roose?

  If you're nervous about writing your vows and you want to enlist some help from an AI to sort of write your first draft, go with God, fine, as long as your partner is cool with it. But if you're gonna pass that off as your own thing, I just think that sets a precedent of dishonesty that does not portend well for the future of the relationship.

• 35:38Casey Newton?

  I will agree. And the amazing last thing I would say is, you know, when I have seen my friends give their own vows, watching them do that in a heartfelt way are some of my favorite moments that I've ever seen my friends, you know? So try not to deny yourself that of like actually saying something that you truly believe.

• 35:54Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Kevin Roose?

  But I've also heard some truly terrible speeches at weddings, which maybe chat GPT would have done a better job of.

• 36:00Casey Newton?

  Good point.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  You know, in Forrest Gump, when he says, I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is. That is enough. Like, I'm not saying that the that the people using the chat GPT are not smart. I'm just saying you can quote something and have it might be better. Like, it's it's OK if it's not your own words. It's just the lying, I think it's.

• 36:20Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  Boy, oh, boy. Well, how devastating. How strange. How bizarre.

• 36:25Kevin Roose?

  I wonder like how many divorce filings that's gonna be cited in like irreconcilable differences because I discovered that my wedding vows were written by chat GPT.

• 36:33Casey Newton?

  Probably more than one.

• 36:35Kevin Roose?

  OK, this next question comes from listener Ben Theegle, and it comes in response to a segment we did a few weeks ago about cultivated meat, essentially meat that is grown from cells in a lab. Casey and I tried some cultivated beef in the form of meatballs, and we asked this question, is lab grown meat ever going to be a viable alternative to our current way of getting meat, which is killing animals? And so in response to this episode, Ben sent in this question.

• 37:00Speaker 07

  Hey, guys, this is Ben from Minneapolis. A while back, you talked about lab grown meat, and it made me realize that someone eventually down the line will probably create lab grown human flesh. And I'm wondering if you guys think it will be ethical to eat said lab grown human flesh. I do just want to point out, though, that I have no desire to eat human flesh. And I and I recognize that that's exactly what somebody hungry for human flesh would say. But honestly, it just made me think, would it be ethical for these people to grow lab-grown human flesh and then eat that human flesh?

• 37:45Speaker 07

  Happy holidays.

• 37:46Kevin Roose?

  What a question.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  My goodness.

• 37:52Kevin Roose?

  Jenny, where do you come down on lab-grown human flesh?

• 37:55Speaker 05

  He definitely said hungry for human flesh and kept saying, talking about eating it a lot. It does feel like one of those asking for a friend kind of questions. Wow, that just actually completely emptied my mind. And I almost forgot the question. You know, when you're just like, you start to like, just have to tell your legs to, don't run away, don't run away. Like, you have to stay in your seat for the rest of the question. It's hard for me to think that, feel that we should eat that. I don't think that we should. But I don't, I don't know. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but I guess don't, it's not right for me, doesn't feel right, doesn't feel, is it ethical?

• 38:39Speaker 05

  That's kind of a confusing way to set that up.

• 38:42Casey Newton?

  And it sort of feels like it's not his real question, right?

• 38:45Speaker 05

  It's unsettling, right?

• 38:46Casey Newton?

  It is unsettling, yeah. I think, look, the, what we learned during our episode that we did about lab-grown meat is that it's very expensive to make it. And that if you're, if you're making like, human-grown flesh, like, my hope would, that would be for some sort of medical use, you know, to like, save a life. You know, so the idea that there's just sort of like extras on the counter for snacking, I think just seems very unlikely to me. So, any situation where I can imagine lab-grown meat laying around, I actually do think it would be unethical to eat it, because I think it hopefully is there to serve some higher purpose.

• 39:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So, Search Engine, one of our favorite podcasts, hosted by PJ Vogt, recently did an episode about cannibalism and addressed this question. And I've been thinking about it ever since then. And I, you know, I think I've come down on the permissive side. I would eat the lab-grown human flesh.

• 39:36Casey Newton?

  Wait, why?

• 39:37Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I don't know, something about it. Well, so I bite my fingernails. So already I am eating some element of my body. So, why is it any different? You know, and no humans are harmed in the production of this meat. And, you know, I think it could allow people who maybe have a taste for human flesh, which is, again, not me, I'm...

• 39:57Casey Newton?

  Wait, did you submit this question under the name Ben?

• 40:02Kevin Roose?

  No, I just think I would try it, you know, I'm curious.

• 40:05Casey Newton?

  All right. Well, I worry that, you know, we have this special guest and we've already taken the show in such a disturbing direction.

• 40:10Speaker 05

  Oh, it's fine. It's fine with me, honestly. Yeah. I'm not shocked at all that I was on here for 10 minutes and we're all just in the shadows.

• 40:25Casey Newton?

  Welcome to Hard Fork. Want to eat a human flesburger?

• 40:30Speaker 05

  I feel bad for Shania Twain, you know, if she ends up coming on. Yeah.

• 40:35Casey Newton?

  And Shania, if you're listening, please DM us.

• 40:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:39Casey Newton?

  Love you. All right. Let's say that that was probably the worst question that we got. Let's see if the next one is any better.

• 40:45Kevin Roose?

  Okay, this next one comes to us all the way from Copenhagen. And for this one, Jenny, we're going to ask you to channel your best parenting advice. Here's our listener.

• 40:58Speaker 08

  Hello, Hard Fork. Ida Evans-Coll from Copenhagen here. I have a question for you, actually two. Now, it's almost Christmas and my son, Ufe, who's nine years old, gave me his wish list. And there was something on the wish list that I couldn't figure out. It said gaming equipment. And I looked at him and said, Ufe, what do you mean? What kind of gaming equipment? And he looked at me back and then he made this like, just slid it towards a nearby computer and typed into Google, gaming equipment.

• 41:37Speaker 08

  And I asked him, Ufe, did ChatGPT write your wish list for Christmas? And he said, ah, with a little smile, not answering in the same way as when your teacher says, did you cheat, Ufe? And he never answered me because yes, it did. It did write his wish list for Christmas. So my questions would be, number one, is there an age limit for kids using ChatGPT? And secondly, what kind of gaming equipment should I give him? Any ideas for these two pressing questions?

• 42:20Casey Newton?

  Okay, first of all, has there ever been a greater tonal shift in the history of podcasting?

• 42:24Speaker 05

  How wonderful.

• 42:25Casey Newton?

  From lab grown, human flesh consumption to Ufa's Christmas list? Wow.

• 42:30Kevin Roose?

  We're really hitting all the, all the high points here.

• 42:32Casey Newton?

  All right, so Jenny, how do you feel about kids using ChatGPT?

• 42:37Speaker 05

  It's so sweet in a way, like, using it to be like, what should I want? You know, like, it's so sweet. It's like wanting to belong, like, you know, you, I, it's not just that I want something for Christmas. I want to want what other kids want. And that's very sweet, but it also does hurt my heart a little bit. I, I want Edith to talk to Ufa about, is there any way that he might just like on his own know what he wants? That is really where I am, that's like where I go on this. But generally, like, I don't know, I, kids can use the internet for homework and stuff. I, it's just such a different thing to use ChatGPT. I would be very limited, but I'm kind of like a strict mom on that kind of stuff.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  My, my daughter's very little. She's like only allowed to watch a screen like once a week and she watches Bluey and that's just because I want to watch it.

• 43:30Kevin Roose?

  Great show.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  And love Bluey. I think it is like the best show ever.

• 43:33Kevin Roose?

  The best of the toddler shows.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I just, I just love it. But the other thing is, yeah, I have no idea what to tell her about what type of gaming equipment to get because I've basically played a video like game like four times in my life and the last one I played was Tekken.

• 43:49Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  And it was in, I want to say 2002.

• 43:54Kevin Roose?

  Who was your, who was your character on Tekken?

• 43:56Speaker 05

  It was like a big panda? Could that be right?

• 43:59Kevin Roose?

  Great character, yes.

• 44:01Casey Newton?

  Great character. We love her. I, that was very sensible advice to me.

• 44:05Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 44:06Casey Newton?

  You know, my, my thought is like, yes, kids can use ChatGPT, but like with anything else on the internet, you probably just want to do a supervision.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:12Kevin Roose?

  Right, so technically, you're supposed to be 13 or older to use ChatGPT. That's their sort of like terms of, of use, uh, limit. And if you're under 18, you need your parent or guardian's permission to make an account. But obviously, we know that people are using this stuff much younger. Younger than than that, including sometimes with their parents' permission. So I think it's I think it's fine to have ChatGPT write your Christmas list. I think there's nothing like, you know, particularly and I and I agree that it's kind of sweet to want to, you know, get a sense from sort of the the collective hive mind of like what a person my age should want. I will say on this specific issue of whether or not to get Ufa a video game system.

• 44:56Kevin Roose?

  I have some personal history with this because I think from about the age I was like seven or eight until like fourteen or fifteen, every Christmas I asked my parents for a Sega Genesis. And I never got a Sega Genesis. And, you know, I still had many wonderful gifts, but they, I think, correctly intuited that if I had a Sega Genesis, I would never leave the house again. I would never make friends and I would never play sports and I would never do any other activities. And that would become my life. And I think that was probably a wise decision on their part. So, you know, you know, only Iba knows Ufa well enough to know whether he is in danger of becoming that kind of a shut in

• 45:36Kevin Roose?

  through video games, but I would just say, you know, tread carefully because I'm I'm glad that my parents restricted my video game playing during my my formative years. Are you, did you have any kind of restrictions on your video games?

• 45:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you know, limited in terms of maybe how many hours a day we could play. But, you know, we did play video games, we did love them. And so that leads me to conclude that like Ufa should get a gaming console for Christmas. I think as a nine year old, the Nintendo Switch is probably going to have the most stuff on it that he's going to enjoy. So I would look there first, but you can also just get him a little tablet. There are so many cheap little tablets you can get now from Amazon or you can get maybe like a refurbished iPad or something. Lot of games on there and then it is also useful for other stuff. So, you know, you can show them educational videos and, you know, whatever else you want to do to raise your child. So that would be my recommendation for gaming equipment for young Ufa. And of course, we wish Ufa a very Merry Christmas.

• 46:27Kevin Roose?

  All right. Next question comes to us from Aaliyah Deland, who was very persistent. She actually reached out to us multiple times. We see you, Aaliyah. And Aaliyah has a problem that she wanted some advice about. She did something on Amazon that she is now feeling guilty about. And we don't have a voice memo for this one, but I'll just read her message. Here's what she said, lightly edited for brevity. She said, quote, "I recently bought off-brand ink for my printer. The Amazon seller I bought the ink from, which was new, prime-eligible, good reviews, et cetera, thanked me for the purchase and promised $60 worth of Amazon gift cards in exchange for a five-star review. I usually recycle these postcards,

• 47:11Kevin Roose?

  but this one promised 60 Amazon bucks. Turns out that is the price of my conscience because I logged on, left a five-star review, and received an Amazon gift code in exchange." So, she asks, "On the scale of moral repugnance, where does the crime of a fake Amazon review fall? Am I deceiving my fellow shoppers, aiding and abetting some weird internet crime? And where did that money even come from?" So Jenny, we'll start with you. What is your take on whether it is unethical to accept an Amazon gift card in exchange for a disingenuous review?

• 47:44Speaker 05

  Oh, this person feels so bad if they're even thinking of the word "repugnant." You know, I mean, that feels really strong. And I don't, there's a, I am at this place right now where I'm just like, I just want to try to, you know, be as forgiving as possible. Just like, you know, just generally, it seems like, yeah, you obviously don't want to do that, so don't do it again because now you found out that you really don't like it. So that's good information. I don't think it's repugnant. It doesn't seem like the most ethical. But I also think that it was printer ink and not like...

• 48:27Speaker 05

  I don't know, a medical device or like-

• 48:29Casey Newton?

  Right, the COVID vaccine.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, like a, like a, a baby pacifier that breaks in half or something like it. No one's really getting hurt, but if you're just gonna speak about it as an ethical issue, like, yeah, it's not ethical if you're really gonna do the hard math on that one. But also, oh, hon, come on, give yourself a break. You're definitely not gonna do this again.

• 48:53Kevin Roose?

  I have a related question for you both, which is, do you trust Amazon reviews in the year of our Lord 2023? Like, if you see a product, it has tons of great reviews, do you think to yourself, that must be a good product? Or do you think that must have been gamed in some way? Because I am now so cynical that I think all Amazon reviews are fake, or at least a substantial portion of them.

• 49:11Casey Newton?

  We, we know that there is a thriving ecosystem of these fake reviews. And so I, you know, I love that Jenny is bringing a holiday spirit of forgiveness to this listener, and I think, I think we should extend that. You know, at the same time, you can also ask yourself, like, well, what, what world am I creating when I do that? The, the reason that this exists is because Amazon charges all sorts of fees to these sellers who want to be on the platform, and it penalizes them heavily for not having five-star reviews. And so they've incentivized this sort of exact behavior. You know, so our, so our listener wants to know, where did this money come from? Well, most people don't, you know, most people do throw the postcard away, but enough of them actually go through with it, that it is essentially worth it to them to spend the 60 bucks, get the five-star review, and now we'll sell, sell more printer ink.

• 49:56Casey Newton?

  And the net effect of all of that is just that prices go up for all of us, because we're essentially paying all these hidden fees and taxes just to like, use amazon.com. So I wish Amazon would do a better job of ferreting out these, these reviews, and they would tell you that they're removing millions of fake reviews every year. Clearly, there's more work to be done, so we'll give you a pass at this time, Aaliyah, but, um, you know, maybe, maybe reconsider in the new year.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  I never read the reviews. I, I, I just ask my friends about stuff, like in real life, and, uh, yeah, I guess I just, I'm also not that much of a, like, a smart shopper. You know, I'm just clicking away on junk and-

• 50:37Kevin Roose?

  Do you ever leave reviews, Jenny?

• 50:40Speaker 05

  I have not ever left a review. No, but-

• 50:43Kevin Roose?

  Ever? On a restaurant, on a hotel, on anything?

• 50:46Speaker 05

  I don't believe so, but when I'm like, you know, on the phone with Verizon,

• 50:55Speaker 05

  you know, and talking to the person about like, is my phone gonna work when I go over here?

• 51:01Speaker 05

  And then at the end they're like, or, you know, or the airline, like, you're like, why are you calling these places? I'm sure you could do it, you know, online, but I always call the people. And they're like, would you stay on for a review? I always do that.

• 51:16Casey Newton?

  Wow, that is super nice.

• 51:18Speaker 05

  Well, they asked me to, and they're a person.

• 51:23Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Kevin Roose?

  My thing is like, do you know, you remember like, when, when you learned that like Uber drivers get kicked off the platform? If they get like anything less than like a 4.0 rating or something? And so from that point on, you like only rate people five stars, no matter how horrible they are as a driver? Cause like, you don't wanna like mess up their livelihood, right? It's like, maybe you like took a couple of wrong turns or something, but I don't wanna like punish you by like getting you booted off the platform. So I'm just gonna give you five stars. I feel like that is happening with a lot of other categories of thing. Like if I, if I have like a horrible experience at a restaurant, like I'm not leaving them a one star review cause I don't wanna tank the whole restaurant. All I wanted for them to do is to like, you know, fix it up a little bit.

• 52:03Casey Newton?

  I totally agree with this. I'm so tired of being asked to review things. You know, it's like on DoorDash, I'll order like the same four items every week. And then every week I get a push notification that's like, how'd you like it? Like leave a review. I'm like, my review is that I've ordered it 36 times this year. That is my review. Do with that information what you will, but that's all I have to say about it.

• 52:21Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 52:25Kevin Roose?

  We'll be right back.

• 52:34Speaker 00

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• 54:14Kevin Roose?

  All right. All right. Next question comes to us from a professor. Wow. At a university in Texas. So this is from our listener.

• 54:23Speaker 10

  I recently exposed 10 of my students for cheating on the midterm exam using ChatGPT. Their answers have the exact same bullet point format as ChatGPT answers, and they contain words that I've never used in class. So the process was handled centrally at my university. And the final outcome is that seven out of 10 students stood their ground. Only three out of 10 confessed. So I'm finding myself in the unfortunate situation of having to give a score of zero to the three students who admitted responsibility and apologized to me. But I cannot penalize the other seven, who I'm sure 99% have cheated. Any thoughts on this?

• 55:08Kevin Roose?

  That's a tough one. So I have some thoughts on this. Okay. And then I want to hear what you guys think of it. All right. I think this is a terrible situation. And I hate to call out a listener of, you know, to this show who has, you know, who has taken the time to send us a voice memo explaining their problem. But I think in this case, we need to stop trying to accuse people of using ChatGPT when we don't know for sure that they have. I think this is a big deal in high schools and colleges all over the country right now. There are all these schools that have used these ChatGPT detector programs to try to like catch students in the act. We know that these programs do not work. They have tons and tons of false positives. And imagine being a college student and you have worked really hard on your essay

• 55:52Kevin Roose?

  or your paper or your midterm, and you turn it in and what comes back is an accusation that you have plagiarized. Yeah. You know, if that's true, it's true, whatever. But if it's false and you are falsely accusing people, and by the way, these programs, these detector programs falsely accuse people all the time, especially, it turns out, people for whom English is a second language, you are doing that person a deep, deep disservice. And I would say actually inflicting like what could be a trauma on them. Because being accused of cheating if you have not cheated and having that show up on your transcript or result in some disciplinary action from your school is just a really bad thing to go through. But also, in this situation, what happens, as this listener noted, is that you end up

• 56:34Kevin Roose?

  punishing the honest students who actually cop to having done this. Meanwhile, the people who are lying about it get away with it.

• 56:41Casey Newton?

  Well, they weren't that honest. They did cheat on the tests.

• 56:44Kevin Roose?

  She doesn't know that. There's no way that you can tell.

• 56:47Casey Newton?

  Well, she said three of them came forward instead of they cheated.

• 56:49Kevin Roose?

  Three of them came forward instead of they cheated. But I just think this is like, this is a terrible status quo at schools is to like, have teachers trying to like, flag which of their students have used ChatGPT. It's just not gonna work.

• 57:01Casey Newton?

  All right. I want to get Jenny's thoughts on this, in part because soon your child will be in school and maybe will want to use ChatGPT. And I wonder if you have feelings about that.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh. Well, the first thing that I'm thinking of is like, what a bummer if as a learner, your options are kind of like, either you're so, you're stressed or you're, something is not happening for you that like you decide to use ChatGPT or that you don't care. So you're just like, I'm just phoning it and I'm using it. Either way, like, that's a bummer because then you won't, you won't really get what you're supposed to get from your education. But in the end, it's like, it's hard to under, for me to, uh, I, listening to Kevin, I'm like, yeah, like, how much of a job is it like a professor? You know, like a professor at a university, is it their job to be a, a disciplinarian and like, kind of like this, like a weird new instant magistrate about like a technology that's freaking everybody out in terms of like,

• 57:55Speaker 05

  wait, are we actually gonna learn? Is information even gonna get in anymore? Or like, are we gonna create a society of students that just like are trying to tick stuff off a list and they actually don't have much information. They just have like experience of trying to get through. And in the end, like, it is up to her to be an educator and that's hard enough.

• 58:14Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  But I guess you can't, like with a college student, it's hard to, you know, they skip class. Like, they're not high, I mean, high schoolers skip class too. You're talking to like a big dork here. It's like, in high school, obviously, everybody's there for every minute.

• 58:29Kevin Roose?

  You were not out smoking behind the gym?

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. Not me. In high school, I was, uh, yeah, nose in the books. But yeah, in, in college, more hitting the bong. Um, but I still went to class. And, you know, I was like, my Nana Connie is paying for me to go to college. If I don't actually like, use this, it's, you know, kind of a shame for all of us, isn't it? It's, I guess it's up to the students in the end, but they do have this, you know, tantalizing new shortcut that they could use.

• 58:57Casey Newton?

  It is tantalizing. Yeah. It is tantalizing. I have a couple of thoughts. You know, one, if you feel bad that you punished these students who were dishonest, but then they were honest, could you offer them some makeup work? Could you say like, look, you were, you were straight with me in the end. Here's a makeup assignment. I'm going to let you earn some of these points back as a way of saying, hey, thank you for, for showing some integrity. So I would, I would suggest that as a first step. The second step is unfortunately, I do think this listener is just going to have to rethink their curriculum going forward. And I realize what a tedious and exhausting and upsetting thing this is to say, but we have talked about on the show all year. Education is going to have to evolve to adapt to a world in which ChatGPT exists and where students can get these programs to spit out very credible essays. Right?

• 59:42Casey Newton?

  We've even talked about some potential solutions. You can have students write essays in class. You can design curricula that asks students to use these programs and, and talk about how they use them as kind of assistant, a research assistants and partners. So I think that will better prepare them for the world that they're going to live in than a world that says absolutely no ChatGPT ever. And so I would just suggest to this professor that this might, might be the time over the winter break to start thinking, okay, how can I evolve this curriculum?

• 1:00:11Kevin Roose?

  Great response. Thank you.

• 1:00:13Casey Newton?

  Thank you.

• 1:00:14Kevin Roose?

  This next question comes to us from a software engineer in Massachusetts named David. And David has a question. Casey, do you want to read any of these, by the way?

• 1:00:23Casey Newton?

  Oh, I think you're doing a great, I would, but I think you, you have a very sort of brisk manner about you when you do this, something I enjoy.

• 1:00:28Kevin Roose?

  Okay. This next question comes to us from a software engineer in Massachusetts named David. And David has a question about a tool his company is using that makes him a little uncomfortable. And he worries that if customers knew that this was being used, this tool, that it would make them feel uncomfortable too. This tool is called Session Replay. And David says it basically allows him to reconstruct and monitor every single thing a customer does when they go to his company's website. Here's David.

• 1:00:59Speaker 11

  You can see their mouse movements in real time. You can see their keyboard presses. You can see where they scroll and how long they take to do all these things. You know, I've seen people type out gift messages for things that they're purchasing to loved ones. And I've seen them rephrase what they're typing and change the words to craft exactly the right intimate message for their family member. It all just feels a little too much. At the same time, these tools help us solve problems with our with our website that we would never have been able to solve any other way. So I guess my hard problem is I really want to continue using this tool, but it makes me very uncomfortable and I'd love to get your thoughts.

• 1:01:42Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:01:43Casey Newton?

  What do you think?

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

  A gift message? I mean, I have not, maybe, maybe to my sisters, you know, you, you are such a magnificent woman, you know, keep shining your power out, whatever, there's, there's, you know, a happy, nice, that's a crazy, I would never write that, I don't even know why I said that, that's not what I write, but for most of the presents that I send, unless it's a baby gift, you know, to my close friends, like, the, and there are drafts of messages, you know, in those little gift message squares on the, and, you know, where you can fill it in, that are like, hey, turd, like, here's a delivery from the dildo farm, like, wrapped in a fart, so that, you know, you can eat my shit, anyhow, like, your mom's here, she

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  says she likes me more than you, like, it's just, it's, it's nothing, it's garbage, the idea that somebody would even see that is, it's sort of funny, but also terrifying, and generally, yeah, I'm super freaked out by, by that, I'm very, very freaked out by that, why do they need that? I guess, I guess, you could tell me why they need that, that's what, that's why I like your podcast a lot.

• 1:02:54Casey Newton?

  They're saying that they needed to improve the website, and, you know, look, when you're, when you're designing software, a thing that happens a lot is you think you've made something very easy, and then you show it to a person, they can't make heads or tails of it, right? And so, being able to track their every movement on a website might let you say, in a sort of automated way, aha, like, they're not doing this thing because they actually can't find this, you know, item on the menu bar or something. So, I'm like, moderately sympathetic to that idea, but I'm just sort of a big believer in the idea that, like, if you, if you wouldn't just tell your customers upfront that you were doing this, you probably shouldn't be doing it. Yes, this is my thing, like, Yeah.

• 1:03:32Kevin Roose?

  I understand that this tool is creating some value for this company, right? At least ostensibly, that's why they installed it. They don't just like have a surveillance like kink. They do derive some business value out of being able to snoop on their customers like this. I would just say like, is the value that you're getting that getting from that tool greater than the amount of value you would lose if this came to light? If your customers knew that you were doing this, would it destroy trust and value in your company to a degree that it actually would dwarf the gains that you would get from using this tool? And it sounds like from the way this tool is being described by our listener, like, it's actually not worth it. Like, if you are feeling freaked out about this as an engineer working at this company,

• 1:04:17Kevin Roose?

  it's a safe bet that your customers would feel freaked out about it, too. And so I guess my question is like, what should David do?

• 1:04:25Casey Newton?

  Well, I mean, look, it's very hard as a single employee to be the rabble rouser and to go to your bosses and say like, this doesn't feel right. But if he feels comfortable enough, I do think it is worth raising an alarm here and just saying, you know, this doesn't really seem like it is consistent with our values. And, you know, it may be the case that his bosses come back to him and say, you know, tough beans, this is just the way it's going to be around here. And then I think David's gonna have to make a choice about whether he wants to work at that company. Unfortunately, I suspect that most tech companies are collecting massive amounts of data, often in not a very straightforward way. And so it might be hard to find another job that was more aligned with his values. But at the very least, I would consider speaking up about this internally.

• 1:05:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, there might also be some sort of technical solution. There might be a less invasive way to get similar kinds of information. Maybe not what people are writing in their gift messages, but, you know, tracking where people's mouses are moving. Like, there might be a way to get some of the same information in a way that was less creepy.

• 1:05:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah, ask ChatGPT.

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  You know how, you know, the game like floor, when like the floor is lava?

• 1:05:32Casey Newton?

  The floor is lava, yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 05

  You just have to go from like one location to the other. Like, now when I'm on any website, I'm just, I'm gonna be so. Just like click that, click that, and you're out. You know, like, I'm gonna just be so careful.

• 1:05:44Casey Newton?

  The internet is lava.

• 1:05:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, the internet is lava. Wow.

• 1:05:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:05:49Casey Newton?

  At the end of the day.

• 1:05:50Kevin Roose?

  All right, this next question comes to us from a listener who works as a mail carrier for the postal service named Charde. Charde has some concerns about how technology that tracks movement might be used against them or against mail carriers someday. Charde writes, quote, "It's been on my mind that the Android-based scanners we are required to use as part of our daily work routines are capable of many things, including the GPS monitoring we carriers know of, but potentially they might one day monitor my stride, coordination, and other biometric data and report these out to management. It strikes me as an ethical quandary, but also as a hard reality of the kind of work I do.

• 1:06:34Kevin Roose?

  Are there any restrictions you're aware of on companies monitoring or collecting this kind of data? And if not, should I be asking my union and asking my legislators to make banning its collection a priority?" What do you both think?

• 1:06:47Speaker 05

  What if I knew that answer about like what the...

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, Charde, I know. I know exactly like, you know, this, the answer to the first part of your question about, about what they're allowed to do. Sorry, but no, I was just making a joke. I feel like someone should answer that before I do because it really has some serious questions and it's fairly scary. You know, like, that's one of these questions that's like, in the future, you know, it makes you think that like pre... What is the Minority Report? You know, in Minority Report with...

• 1:07:18Casey Newton?

  Yes, the precogs.

• 1:07:19Speaker 05

  The precogs, yeah. Yep, yeah, anyway, the precogs in the milk baths. I have no idea what I'm talking about. You guys should go, it's your podcast.

• 1:07:27Casey Newton?

  No, I think you're, I think you're raising a great point, which is this question points us toward a future of precogs in milk baths. And so we do need to take it seriously, you know?

• 1:07:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:34Kevin Roose?

  Well, I would just also add, like, this is not a hypothetical future, right? Amazon, several years ago, started installing AI-powered cameras in a lot of their delivery vans, which tracked not only like how fast the vans were going and whether they were Making any traffic laws, but also like, are drivers fiddling with the radio? Are they distracted? Are they drinking coffee? And it would actually give them scores based on their ratings, which were used in determining like, who got bonuses and who didn't. So a lot of Amazon drivers hated this. Some of them actually quit or threatened to quit over it. And I think this is absolutely a fair thing to take up with the union.

• 1:08:13Casey Newton?

  Yes, I totally agree. You know, we, in an interesting way, like this question and the last question are linked. Because one of the unfortunate aspects of the progress in technology over the past 10 years is that surveillance of every kind has just gotten way easier. And we see over and over again that when people want to surveil something, they just start doing it and they trust that nobody is going to rise up and say anything about it. So that's just kind of like a trend that I'm worried about in general. What I would say, when it comes to this kind of workplace surveillance, I think the rule, the rule here should be that if the CEO of the company will not agree to this kind of surveillance for themselves, then they should not subject the workers to it, right? If the CEO of Amazon wants to have an AI-powered camera on him at all times, while he is just sort of going through his workday and it issues a little report

• 1:08:57Casey Newton?

  that gets like reviewed by the board, then he can start talking about putting AI cameras on all of the delivery vans. Until then, I don't want to hear about it.

• 1:09:05Kevin Roose?

  I love that.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  I like that a lot.

• 1:09:09Speaker 05

  I really do. That feels really good to me. Yeah.

• 1:09:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Yeah. And of course, because what would happen if we did that? We just wouldn't have that much surveillance because rich and powerful people don't want to be surveilled and they're taking for granted that they'll be able to get away with surveilling the less powerful. And we just don't want that dynamic.

• 1:09:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I really like, I do hate this area of AI. I sometimes call this bossware. There's like this whole suite of surveillance technology that is just used to like, make sure people aren't like leaving their desks for like long lunch breaks and stuff. And like, I just, it just boils my blood. Like, why are you using this stuff on your own workers? If you don't trust them, then don't hire them.

• 1:09:48Casey Newton?

  Knock it off.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, it doesn't feel good. And you know what is the weird through line between like, whatever, whether it's like lab-made meat or this Bosware, as you say, it's like, there's just this new era of like uncomfortable areas that we didn't think we would be in because humans like either it just like breaks social norms, you know, so we don't do it like we don't go into these areas. We don't like ask people, how many times did you change the radio while you were driving your mail truck today? Because it's just rude. And like if their production is like if they're doing their job in a way that is is working, it's just not appropriate. And it's it's so demeaning and terrible. And like, there are all these sort

• 1:10:31Speaker 05

  of like relational norms that we used to have that now we have these like new shadow areas that we can go in like on Instagram, you can like, look at a picture of your like, you know, friend's cousin and just like stare at like, you know, your friend's cousin in their exercise clothes. But like in life, if like my husband came into the room and I was holding the physical picture of like my friend's cousin in their exercise clothes, you'd be like,

• 1:10:58Casey Newton?

  It sounds like something that actually happened to you, Jenny. I'm just gonna put that out there.

• 1:11:01Speaker 05

  You know, you know what it is? Actually, it's a to be so honest, it is a I think about this all the time because I just I want to know how like, what are the norms of how we're all behaving? You know, like, what are the general rules? And I thought it would make a really good stand-up joke. And I did it. And, you know, it made just a lot of people angry. They don't want to hear about, you know, whether or not it's okay to do whatever they're doing. And I don't actually mean to judge anyone. I just mean to be like, you know, we're all acting kind of differently, right? You know, like, isn't that noticeable? And like, can we discuss it? But actually, it's it's very sensitive. It's like, really, it's I think it's actually even sensitive for me to say like, yeah, I don't really use my I don't go

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  on my social media anymore, except to post for work. Like, even that will make people mad. It's a it's a strange drug we're all touching here.

• 1:11:52Casey Newton?

  It is. Well, it's I mean, it's almost sort of like telling someone that you don't drink, right? Like, people immediately sort of get very defensive, right? Because it feels like a commentary on them. And of course, it isn't. But people receive it that way.

• 1:12:03Kevin Roose?

  Okay, this next one is a little out there, so maybe like a- Oh, this one is a little out there. I like the cannibalism material from earlier.

• 1:12:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's end this news fest. Let's get, let's get gross. Come on, you guys.

• 1:12:17Kevin Roose?

  Fair point. This one, this one I would say is just a little less grounded in reality. So maybe like take a little microdose or something and we'll dive into this one. I'm chewing my mushroom capsule right now.

• 1:12:27Speaker 05

  I'm already there.

• 1:12:30Kevin Roose?

  This one is from a listener who says they synthesized their own identity and they now worry they might be losing their sense of self. Oh, boy.

• 1:12:39Speaker 12

  Dear Hard Work Team, I'm Fabian. I come from Italy and I have synthesized my own identity half a year ago. And I gave them the name of Syntheola. To give you some context, I am an animator who works with generative AI and I'm making an animated film about and with generative AI. The story will be in a world where everyone has an AI clone. So I thought, why not trying it on my own skin to better understand the problems that arise from that? Basically, I just trained a stable diffusion model on myself with 100 photos. As this month's passed, I saw myself turn into different genders, ethnicity, ages, inserted in all sorts of media like sitcoms, music videos and so on.

• 1:13:24Speaker 12

  My visual identity has become totally fluid into this media landscape and my identity has been boiled down into an icon and a symbol. Now, when I talk with friends, they sometimes refer to me as Syntheola. It feels kind of as if Syntheola will be a celebrity of sorts, since they appear in so much different media. It even occurs to me sometimes that when I look into the mirror, I see Syntheola before I see Fabian. Syntheola has become this alter ego of me that is sort of 120% of me. So the hard question I would like you to ask is, am I dooming my own identity by creating and sharing so much content of my synthetic self online?

• 1:14:08Speaker 12

  Do you believe that I'm planting the seeds for myself to be lost in a sea of replicas that pretend to be me, losing my own self? And am I becoming Syntheola? And if so, is that a bad thing?

• 1:14:24Speaker 12

  Thank you so much for listening to this.

• 1:14:27Casey Newton?

  Okay, I love this question, actually.

• 1:14:29Speaker 05

  That was beautiful.

• 1:14:31Casey Newton?

  It was very beautiful.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Casey Newton?

  And I would just say like that even though he is using a new technology to explore his identity this way, this sort of thing is not new. Rock stars have been doing this for a long time, right? The other person he made me think of is Cindy Sherman, you know, the famous photographer. And Cindy's whole thing is just taking all kinds of self-portraits of her, but just in every incarnation of herself imaginable, looking like every type of profession, every type of person, right? And she's just been playing with that for many years and creating this amazing art of it. You know, I've never interviewed her, so I don't know what that sort of play has done with her own relationship. I'm sure she'd have some really interesting things to say about it.

• 1:15:16Casey Newton?

  But in general, like, can or should you use technology to explore your own identity? Absolutely yes. I know, Jenny, what do you think?

• 1:15:26Speaker 05

  I absolutely loved the way that, it's Fabian, right?

• 1:15:31Casey Newton?

  I believe it's Fabian, yeah.

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, was just like describing their perspective. But, but yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. And I think it's really cool to play as much as you can. And it can feel dangerous too, because you're like, well, what if there's a version of this that honestly just seems superior to me? Maybe that, you know, this, this, what was the name of?

• 1:15:57Casey Newton?

  Cynthia.

• 1:15:58Speaker 05

  Cynthia, which is a beautiful name. So maybe, yeah, maybe Cynthia just seems cooler.

• 1:16:03Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 05

  Like, you know, but it is, it's also a lovely way to return to like your original self and see what's there. I don't know, I'm kind of into the whole thing. I can see why it's scary too, but that also doesn't make me not into it. And clearly, there's a lot of introspection. And honestly, if I could do anything with this message that we just heard, I would like put it at like the start of a, like use it as a creative prompt. For like, it's just like an entire film and make that be the voiceover over the opening credits, like over black, you just hear this, I don't know, I'll see you guys, you know, Toronto or Telluride in 20 years if I ever actually, you know, I'm able to do this. I loved it.

• 1:16:47Kevin Roose?

  Well, and it also, like, you are a great person to answer this question, I think, because you are a performer and are used to, like, assuming different identities in different spaces and some people, I'm sure, you know, know you better for one role than another and maybe you even get people coming up to you saying like, "Oh, it's Marcel the Shell," or something like that. So like, do you have any perspective on that kind of identity play with respect to AI? Like, are you tempted at all to make versions of yourself or your characters in AI that maybe then you would sort of be able to experiment with?

• 1:17:20Speaker 05

  I definitely already get enough of like that strange juxtaposition from just what I do. And, and no, I mean, this is not going to shock you, but no, I'm not tempted to make AI versions of myself or my work. But I do experience a lot of times, like, there are some characters I've played, like Mona Lisa Saperstein, who's, like, they define her as the worst person on earth. And a lot of, I think, like, a lot of people come up to me and say they like that character. And in those moments, I feel compelled to subtly prove that I'm not like her at all. And then, you know, with Marcel the Shell, it's, it

• 1:18:00Speaker 05

  has been confusing to me over the years sometimes because he is the kind of like closest portrait I feel like I could make of my own psyche and my own, like, personality. When it works the best, it just came out as like a male shell with no age. And, but I do think, like, Marcel is a lot more confident than me, for example. And so there are sometimes when people are like, "You're Marcel the Shell," there's like a tiny, just a teeny tiny ding, like a pain of sadness where I'm like, "Not yet." Like, I'm not, you know, I'm not, he's an aspirational personality. But yeah, I like to just keep it in the zones that it's in right now.

• 1:18:38Casey Newton?

  Have you known other actors that will speak about losing themselves in roles? And so worrying that they've gone too far and they can't come back to a place that they went when they stepped into the shoes of a challenging character?

• 1:18:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I certainly have. I think maybe I just haven't had that role yet. But I definitely have known actors, especially if they're playing characters that in one way or another are connected to their own like family or cultural trauma or personal trauma. That can obviously be really, really hard. But you know, for me, my work is so various and I didn't play a lot of cartoon animals too. So that's a real, you know, a real buffer for me. It's a real comfort zone in terms of like, that just absorbs stress and it's not stressful. But yeah.

• 1:19:27Casey Newton?

  Well, and that's like, kind of the note that I wanted to end this question on is like, I think you better than almost anyone could just speak to the joy of exploring your identity by playing different characters. Like, my sense is you really enjoy this.

• 1:19:39Speaker 05

  I love it. And I loved being Mona Lisa because she's so horrible and she has only like, sort of, you know, 100 miles per hour. That's all she can do and she has no remorse. And I actually can overthink things and I'm a big like, consider this, consider that person. And it really, really ruins me to feel like I might have hurt someone's feelings. So it's a wonderful sort of like valve to open up to just be totally horrible. And it does do something for me. You know, it's like, it feels good to be able to be that person. I was actually weirdly just discussing this yesterday. Yeah.

• 1:20:20Kevin Roose?

  All right. So next question comes from a listener who wants to remain anonymous. This listener did not send a voice memo, but wrote in, this is another one of these asking for a friend questions, but they literally said, asking for a friend. And then their question is, is it ethical to watch AI-generated porn? What say you?

• 1:20:41Casey Newton?

  Well, there are just sort of some things you would want to know as like a follow-up question, right? It's like, what, um, how was this AI-generated porn created? Was this language model trained on people who consented to be in the videos that they were in? Did they consent to having their videos used as part of this model? My guess is that anything that exists today, the answer to those questions is gonna be no in enough cases that I would be real, real careful about which AI-generated porn I was consuming at the moment.

• 1:21:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there's also just a lot of like porn from before, you know, if you need it.

• 1:21:23Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Speaker 05

  Just, it's not, you know, like luckily, yeah, you can just find it like with the, you know, the performers from before, they're still there doing it. They're doing it right now, you know, so it's luckily.

• 1:21:33Casey Newton?

  They're literally doing it right now.

• 1:21:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, they are. They're doing it right now. And so it's, yeah, at least there's not gonna be a shortage. But yeah, Casey seems really, I agree. He seems right to me. Yeah.

• 1:21:47Casey Newton?

  No, here are some things I would say sort of in the future, you know, there are some forms of like kink play that are quite intense and or, you know, maybe even involve violence and like where the performers might be at some risk, whether it's like a physical risk or an emotional risk. If we could like offload that risk to software so that like no one was harmed in the in the making of these scenes, that might be a good thing. So I don't want to foreclose forever the prospect that this could like have some societal value, but I think it's gonna be a ways before we get there.

• 1:22:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think the question around consent is the right one to ask. As of now, like, a lot of the stuff you, you know, hear about is like people being worried that their images are gonna be used without consent, turned into deep fakes, put on the internet. This is something that I know regulators and lawmakers are very worried about, and it's a real issue.

• 1:22:42Kevin Roose?

  Or I also think there's gonna be a lot of celebrities who end up, you know, maybe they've never done a nude scene. In a movie, but all of a sudden, they have all these videos of them, you know, appearing to be naked online that were generated by AI. And so, you know, that kind of thing. I think the answer to is it ethical to watch AI generated porn? I would say, you know, I don't see any reason it's inherently unethical, but I also think it touches on a lot of very sensitive issues and areas where you could behave unethical.

• 1:23:14Speaker 13

  One thing about porn, always touching on sensitive issues.

• 1:23:16Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:23:17Speaker 13

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:19Speaker 05

  A lot of times, that's the best part of it. Sorry.

• 1:23:21Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22Speaker 05

  I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I asked her to come on your podcast and then I said that.

• 1:23:26Kevin Roose?

  I'm blushing in this podcast studio.

• 1:23:28Speaker 05

  The idea that I could come on this podcast that's beloved to me. And I've just been so nervous the entire time. It's so crazy. And then that somehow it would take a turn into me saying something gross. When I listen to it every week and I think this podcast makes me so happy. I feel so welcome. I love listening to these friends. They make each other laugh so hard. There's great information and then we're here and then I say something and it's, it's, you know, it's gross. And I'm just so sorry.

• 1:23:53Speaker 13

  It was literally perfect. It was perfect, Jimmy.

• 1:23:55Kevin Roose?

  You're wonderful. Don't change.

• 1:23:56Speaker 13

  Yeah, it was perfect.

• 1:23:57Kevin Roose?

  So, okay. Last question. This one comes to us from a listener named Ren Kulp, who essentially asks, hey, can I be a member of society in the future if I don't always want to be on the internet?

• 1:24:09Speaker 05

  That's, that's where I'm at. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Go ahead.

• 1:24:13Speaker 13

  Let's hear the question.

• 1:24:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Speaker 13

  Hey, guys. My name is Ren. I'm from Los Angeles. My question is, I in the future would love to be on the internet less, like less social media presence, less availability. You know, I don't need other people knowing every inch of my life. But I worry sometimes that if I scale back, that if I leave the internet, that if I kind of don't check on it anymore, that the culture might pass me by, that I might all of a sudden be the old guy in the room, that I might not be as up to date on the happenings of the world if I were not on the internet all the time. And so I just wondered, do you think it's possible to live and be informed and engaged in aspects of life?

• 1:25:03Speaker 13

  In the future without the internet. Thanks.

• 1:25:06Speaker 05

  I feel that.

• 1:25:08Speaker 13

  Yeah, we'll speak to that, Jimmy. Speak to that.

• 1:25:11Speaker 05

  I think there are always levels of like, are you on the cutting edge of what the new language is? Like, do you know all the new songs? Do you know like where fashion is? You know, like, there's always gonna be

• 1:25:22Speaker 05

  people who want to be at the front of the line, sort of, and like have the best view of what's changing and what's the newest. I think there's a middle ground. I also think it's like a really cool, personal, like, personal work to figure out like, how important it is, is it to you? Not to be included, but to like, know the newest thing, like, why do you need that? And how important is it to you? And I don't mean it in a judgy way, like, why do you need that? But it's, it's, it's a good question. I ask myself that. I was watching the movie Dumb Money last night. I don't know if you guys have seen it. I loved it. I loved it so much. And one of the things that really got me was that I was like, I don't understand how the people are communicating with each other.

• 1:26:03Speaker 05

  Like, I was just completely floored by how funny everyone was and how sassy, like, everyone seemed so cool. And I was like, wow, that really has passed me by. I'm not there anymore. And I think there will be a

• 1:26:17Speaker 05

  a layer of like, communication and culture and that kind of style, like, communication style and, and like visual style, like graphic, like, I was like, looking at the graphics and the way people were like making little videos. And I just was like, I am not on the internet. I've never seen any of this. Wow. But I also think that the rest of the world is still there and there won't be this like, terrible loneliness or shut out if that is what happened. And I, I do kind of live that. I really do. I, I also like, use my social media so that people can know when I make my work. Because even though sometimes I'm in like, larger projects, I'm actually kind of like a Rather like, I feel like my performances are rather niche and I like need to let people

• 1:26:59Speaker 05

  know when they're happening and and I think there's a middle ground and I think it's really worth it to step off if that feels right for you. It doesn't have to be a judgmental thing. It could just be a happy sort of like loosening.

• 1:27:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I I love. I mean, again, this goes back to feel comfortable managing your relationship with technology. You want to take a step back from something, take a step back from something, you know, most people do not perform on the internet for money. It so happens that the three people making this podcast. But like, most people are not like that, and that's okay. I think the one thing I would say, though, is don't disengage completely. Like, we do need engaged citizens in this moment. That's going to mean getting the news and getting the news in 2023 and 2024 is going to mean going online to get it.

• 1:27:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Casey Newton?

  You know, there were the I read a couple of stories after Trump won where people would just sort of like move to a secluded area and were just basically like wake me up in four years and would like go to extraordinary lengths to never hear about anything that was happening. That is not a recipe for the survival of democracy. Okay, so if you need to take a step back because you you're upset by what's on the news, certainly, we've all felt that. I can totally respect that. But don't, you know, keep keep at least a little bit engaged.

• 1:28:13Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think the this is something that I think about a lot because I've always been a person who likes to know about things like the minute they happen. Right? We're journalists. We like to be up to speed. But also, like, I was always the person like explaining the new meme at the dinner party or like, you know, telling people what this, you know, piece of slang that the teens were saying on TikTok is and like, as I've gotten older, that has become less possible for me because I just don't like have as much time to spend scouring the deepest recesses of the internet anymore. And so I just don't know stuff. And there's been a surprising amount of like joy and freedom in that. Like, I don't have to know about things the minute they happen. Some if it's important, somebody will tell me or I'll see it a day later and it's not the end of the world. So I would

• 1:28:53Kevin Roose?

  just say like, like, be open, Ren, to the possibility that you might actually be happier and and actually more informed if you sort of allow a little time to pass between when something happens and when you hear about it or see it.

• 1:29:07Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well said.

• 1:29:08Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:10Kevin Roose?

  All right. That's it for our hard questions. Jenny, do you have any questions for us?

• 1:29:14Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh, I guess, and I don't know if, if like, I don't know if you'll want to answer this and, and you talk about it a little bit or sometimes you guys like joke, but like, are there ever days when you're like me and you are really, really scared? That it seems that the people who are making the AI don't that they don't know like how it works. And I know you've discussed that a bit, but um, and maybe I have missed it and you have given that, but yeah, is there um, are there ever days where you, where you feel a bit bleak about it?

• 1:29:52Kevin Roose?

  Kevin?

• 1:29:54Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I um,

• 1:29:58Kevin Roose?

  you know, we've, we've talked about this on the show, but I, I sort of went through a period this year where I was feeling very bleak. Not just sort of in the existential, like we're all gonna die scenario, but like, you know, I'm a creative person. I write words for a living and I was sort of having, I don't know, you could call it like a mini existential crisis after ChatGPT came out and it was like, oh, wait a minute, is this thing that I am doing, that I've been doing my whole career, like, am I obsolete? Um, essentially, and you know, I've come to a better place over the course of the last year or so on, on that. I now like,

• 1:30:37Kevin Roose?

  I don't feel like I or we are obsolete. I don't necessarily think we're all going to die. And so I, and I, I've found that my own, the thing that I can do during the periods when I am feeling bleak that helps me is just to, to try something new with the technology. Like if I'm feeling scared about AI, like I'll go draw a picture with AI or I'll go like, you know, use it to, to solve some like esoteric, you know, problem that I'm having or teach myself something. And, and then that, that like, just knowing that the technology can be used for that kind of good stuff as well as the scary stuff, um, just helps me balance out my own perspective. I don't know. Casey, how do you feel about this?

• 1:31:22Casey Newton?

  I like that. I mean, yes, I also. Absolutely feel those moments of fear. I think that there are some really good futures that are possible. And I think there's some really scary and bad futures that are possible. And I think it's uncomfortably close to a coin flip as to like which world we wind up living in. And that's scary, right? I wish I could just kind of relax, knowing that it was all gonna be okay. But like, I don't feel that way. But that's like, why I'm a journalist. I want to try to understand this stuff better. I want to explain it to other people. I want other people who are in positions to act, to act. I want people who are just like citizens of this country to vote, right? And I just want to believe that if we do those things, we make the good futures much likelier.

• 1:32:08Casey Newton?

  And that's how I just kind of manage the fears day to day.

• 1:32:11Speaker 05

  That's, that's really nice to know. And I guess like thinking about it, I'm like, one of the reasons why I started listening to your podcast was because I don't know anything about this area. I've been sort of like in rejection of it, but also because I'm really afraid of it. And it would be better to hear like human beings with good personalities, talk about something that makes me a bit uncomfortable and that I do feel separate from. Because the gap will close a bit and I will be involved. I'll like be aware of discussions. And I, I think that is really, I know for me, it's been worth a lot.

• 1:32:49Casey Newton?

  I love that. It means so much to us.

• 1:32:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, it means a lot.

• 1:32:52Casey Newton?

  Honestly, like we, we started this show just because we, we are so fascinated by this stuff. We wanted to share it with other people and not just because it was interesting in an intellectual way, but because we think it's important to whatever world we wind up living in.

• 1:33:04Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And I would just say, like, Casey, the one thing that I'll disagree with you on is like, this is not a coin flip because a coin flip involves that it's total luck. And as we've said on the show before, as I continue to believe, like, we are in control of this technology and all technology. We build it, we deploy it, we make rules about it. Like, it is not purely a passive role that we have in deciding how the future goes. And a lot of how the future goes will depend on the decisions that people in positions of authority, but also just people who use this stuff and have a voice and a platform. Feel about it and what they decide to speak up about.

• 1:33:43Casey Newton?

  Very well said. All right, Jenny, it has been the dream of our lives that you are here. If people want to know what you are up to next, should they follow you on Instagram? Or where would you like to send them?

• 1:33:54Speaker 05

  Well, actually, that is true. They should follow me on Instagram.

• 1:33:59Speaker 05

  Because I do post about when my new work is coming out. And I'm about to announce a couple of things that I am truly thrilled about. I can't do it yet, but I will soon.

• 1:34:11Kevin Roose?

  What a tease.

• 1:34:11Speaker 05

  I know. Sorry.

• 1:34:16Speaker 05

  But I do, I, it will be there. And so, yeah, that's a good place. Yeah, because I don't, I don't have Twitter or X anymore.

• 1:34:26Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 1:34:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Casey Newton?

  And it is Jenny Slate on Instagram, so super easy to find.

• 1:34:30Speaker 05

  It certainly is.

• 1:34:31Casey Newton?

  I just wanted to say one more thing to you, Jenny, before you go. And it's actually something that you once said to your dear sister. You are a magnificent woman. Keep shining your power out.

• 1:34:42Kevin Roose?

  Very well said.

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  Really good. Oh, brother.

• 1:35:15Speaker 00

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• 1:36:55Kevin Roose?

  Before we go, Casey, I have a special surprise for you. Oh, boy. Do you remember last year, we sang a special holiday song? I do remember that. And it was, we let ChatGPT write it, and it was to the tune of Jingle Bells, and it was all about all the tech news that we covered in 2022. It was a really fun bit. Well, it was really fun, and I decided we should repeat it this year. But instead of having ChatGPT write it, I went ahead and wrote us a holiday song. Oh, my goodness. Like, you wrote it yourself? I did. Okay. Okay, so this is the lyrics to our holiday song. Okay. And we're gonna sing it together. Wonderful. Are you ready? Yes. Okay, so this is to the tune of the 12 Days of Christmas. Okay. And it's called "Hard Forkin' Christmas." And we have a track that's gonna come in momentarily, and then you and I are gonna sing this together.

• 1:37:40Kevin Roose?

  Now, are we alternating, or we have to say we're singing it in unison? We're singing it all together. Okay. Okay. Is your singing voice warmed up? No.

• 1:37:49Speaker 14

  On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me A board Ape NFT. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me Two GPUs and a board Ape NFT. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me Three Cybertrucks, two GPUs, and a board Ape NFT. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me Four Google Bars, three Cybertrucks, two GPUs, and a board Ape NFT.

• 1:38:35Speaker 14

  On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me Sam Bankman-Fried. Four Google Bars, three Cybertrucks, two GPUs, and a board Ape NFT. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me Six Meta Lawsuits, Sam Bankman-Fried. Four Google Bars, three Cybertrucks, two GPUs, and a board Ape NFT. Keep going, this is great. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me

• 1:39:19Speaker 14

  Seven Robo-Taxis, six Meta Lawsuits, Sam Bankman-Fried. Four Google Bars, three Cybertrucks, two GPUs, and a board Ape NFT. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me Eight Blue Sky Invites, seven Robo-Taxis, six Meta Lawsuits, Sam Bankman-Fried. Four Google Bars, three Cybertrucks, two GPUs, and a board Ape NFT.

• 1:39:59Speaker 14

  On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me. Nine deep fake scandals, eight blue sky invites, seven robot taxis, six meta lawsuits, Sam Bankman free. Four Google bars, three cyber trucks, two GPUs, and a bored ape NFT. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me. Ten boardroom dramas, nine deep fake scandals, eight blue sky invites, seven robot taxis, six meta lawsuits, Sam Bankman free.

• 1:40:41Speaker 14

  Four Google bars, three cyber trucks, two GPUs, and a bored ape NFT. Can't promise we're almost done. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me. Eleven VR headsets, ten boardroom dramas, nine deep fake scandals, eight blue sky invites, seven robot taxis, six meta lawsuits, Sam Bankman free. Four Google bars, three cyber trucks, two GPUs, and a bored ape NFT. One more. On a hard fork in Christmas, my true love gave to me.

• 1:41:24Speaker 14

  Twelve world coin orbs, eleven VR headsets, ten boardroom dramas, nine deep fake scandals, eight blue sky invites, seven robot taxis, six meta lawsuits, Sam Bankman free. Four Google bars, three cyber trucks, two GPUs, and a bored ape NFT.

• 1:41:54Kevin Roose?

  Happy holidays.

• 1:41:55Casey Newton?

  Happy holidays, everybody.

• 1:41:57Kevin Roose?

  Happy holidays, everyone.

• 1:41:59Casey Newton?

  Do they keep data on the most skipped parts of podcasts? Because I think we might just set a new record.

• 1:42:04Kevin Roose?

  I think we actually just got ourselves deplatformed from every major podcasting platform.

• 1:42:09Casey Newton?

  Well, we had a good run.

• 1:42:10Kevin Roose?

  Yep. See you next year.

• 1:42:11Casey Newton?

  See you next year.

• 1:42:13Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We had help this week from Kate LaPresti. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Corey Shreppel. Original music by Diane Wong, Rowan Nemestow, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Ferguson. By the way, if you don't already subscribe, you can check us out on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Kwuwing Tam, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at [email protected].

• 1:42:51Casey Newton?

  Happy holidays.

• 1:42:52Kevin Roose?

  See you next year.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

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